I agree - I regularly come across people who are struggling to “get” OSM; often they’ve seen a map using OSM data, and would like to understand what is shown there and influence what is shown there too.
There are lots of tools available to help people add things to OSM Data (editors for all sorts of use cases) but relatively little to help people contribute to map styles or other software. The bigger problem here is that we’re actually not short of ideas, but we are short of people willing to put the effort in (for free!) to convert ideas into usable software.
Whenever anyone suggests “OSMF should do X” a reply is “why don’t you do a small scale X first, as a proof of concept”. That’s how many things that are now part of OSMF started (including the original web forums), and it might be workable here. I’ve no idea what’s required to set up SSO using OSM as an IdP for Forgejo (I’d never heard of it until your message above), but it’d be good to outline what you’d need to do the project yourself (including presumably a small virtual server somewhere) as an initially-entirely-separate-to-OSMF thing.
Once you’ve got some PoC infrastructure working I’d suggest picking an initial project that would benefit from the better integration with OSM accounts that this infrastructure would provide. You’ve written about hosting mapping parties etc. - maybe something around that would be a good “first project”?
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